If Martin Scorsese , Monty Python and Ken Loach got together for a satanic sex orgy on The Wicker Man island, the resulting love child might be Ben Wheatley.

The cult British writer/director has made three films since 2009. All appeared on critics’ ‘top ten films of the year’ lists. The first two, Down Terrace and Kill List, you’ve probably never heard of, let alone seen. That’s unlikely to be said of Sightseers, his biggest release to date.

‘It’s a romcom about a couple getting to know each other through the medium of minor museums, caravanning and murder,’ is Wheatley’s deadpan pitch for what’s already being dubbed the 21st century’s Withnail And I.

In it, an awkward Midlands couple (Alice Lowe and Steve Oram) embark on a staycation road trip that turns into a serial killing spree. It’s painfully funny, gruesomely violent and, like all of Wheatley’s work, quintessentially British, celebrating the beauty of our green and pleasant land and its quirkier visitor attractions.

‘The Pencil Museum [in Keswick] is a great place,’ Wheatley enthuses. ‘And so is the Crich Tramway Museum. They have trams from all over the world!’

Both are sure to soon get an influx of Sightseers’ fans. Did these attractions know what they’d signed up to? Wheatley gives his first of many dry chuckles. ‘It’s difficult to have someone lying in your car park with blood gushing out of their neck and think it’s a musical.’

Wheatley’s work is characterised by a challengingly nasty form of violence – ‘I enjoy watching it,’ he admits. Yet it always has purpose and context.

‘I think a lot of the paranoia of Kill List, Down Terrace and Sightseers comes from the prospect of the banks collapsing,’ he muses. ‘What would we have done? Things would have changed disastrously fast. It starts with your plastic not working in the cash machine and you’ve only got two cans of tuna and some old soup in the kitchen cupboard.

‘Then, quickly, you’re at each other’s throats, fighting your neighbour over food. I think that’s why you’ve got so many zombie films at the moment. Because zombie films are just a metaphor for civil war, aren’t they? The fantasy is that they’re zombies, so it’s fine to kill them but I reckon the reality will be something much, much more horrible.’

Speaking of zombies, Sightseers is co-produced by Shaun Of The Dead director Edgar Wright. It was also written by its stars Oram and Lowe (from The Mighty Boosh). Yet it’s unmistakably a Wheatley film.

Though you may be able to soundbite Sightseers as ‘Natural Born Killers meets Mike Leigh’s Nuts In May’ or Down Terrace, an award-winning Brighton crime drama, as ‘The Sopranos meets Ken Loach’, Wheatley’s work is vibrant, idiosyncratic and all his own. Well, his and the wife’s. Wheatley met Amy Jump at a north London college when they were 16 and she’s since become his long-term creative collaborator and editor (check out their website mrandmrswheatley.blogspot.com ).

‘We rewrote the script [of Sightseers] and restructured it to fall into line with the other movies that we’ve done,’ he admits.

That included adding a trademark ‘magick’ element, a dimension that featured most strongly in Kill List, which starts as a hitman thriller and ends as The Wicker Man meets Blair Witch.

‘It feels like there’s something lurking in British culture,’ he says. ‘Everywhere you go on these islands there’s weird stone circles and magical lay lines and weird mushrooms and all that kind of life that we just don’t talk about any more. Ideas that pre-date organised religion. I’m a big fan of folk dancing and Morris men and maypoles and all that kind of stuff as well.’

No wonder, as Wheatley acknowledges, his films are seen as curios in the US, where audiences often complain they ‘don’t understand what anyone’s saying’. ‘It’s heartbreaking,’ he admits.

Hence he’s in pre-production on Freakshift, a monster sci-fi movie set in an alternate reality US, with American characters but shot in Britain (Wheatley has a nine- year-old son and needs to be around on weekends).

With a slated $15million (£9.3million) budget, it’s a step up in scale (Down Terrace was shot in eight days and cost £6,000) but is barely the beginning of Wheatley’s ambition. ‘I’d really like to make a big Hollywood studio picture,’ he says, surprisingly. ‘To open a film on that platform. Sightseers is opening on 100 screens in the UK but we still haven’t done the capacity release, which is around 400; in America it’s ten times that.

‘To get that right would be really interesting, without changing yourself, but it’s not like my ultimate plan is to keep bumping up budgets till we’re making Battleship 2.’

Could Wheatley be the new Christopher Nolan? Or, given his similar start in low-budget gore plus writing-partner wife, the new Peter Jackson? One thing’s for certain, he is a film-maker going places. ‘I remember on my first day at school there was a kid who came up to me and punched me on the nose and said: “My name’s Ben Wheatley and you’ve got my name.”’